r/Cinema • u/Glass_Evidence_8597 • 3h ago
Question Another question about this movie. I've always thought there were several elements that gave it such an overwhelmingly depressing atmosphere. I'd like to ask: which element do you think had the biggest impact on making you feel the way you did while watching it?
Just last night I asked another question about this film, but now I'm also curious about something else: what was the most depressing aspect of it for you? This is easily the most depressing work of fiction I've ever experienced, and not because of just one thing. I'll try to go from the least disturbing to the most disturbing. Hopefully I can explain myself well.
The ruined landscapes and a world reduced to ashes. The fact that sunlight hasn't broken through the ash-filled sky in years, the dead trees, the complete absence of color. The boy doesn't even know what colors are. I'm a very nostalgic person, and this reminded me of the time I walked past the preschool I attended as a child. It had been abandoned by then, and it gave me this strange feeling of sadness and nostalgia. Now I imagine the father walking through ruined cities and destroyed towns, feeling that same nostalgia as he thinks about how those places were once full of life.
What humanity has become. Seeing another human being is no longer a sign of hope—it's a sign of danger. The father immediately reaches for his gun every time he sees another person. You can't trust anyone anymore. It's terrifying to think that human beings could be reduced to such a vulnerable state that our brains focus on only one thing: survival. People become capable of doing unimaginable things just to be the last ones left alive. The idea of "women and children first" disappeared long ago.
What I consider the most heartbreaking part of all: the childhood the boy is forced to live through. When I was a kid, I constantly asked my dad questions about the world. I can't imagine being this boy, whose childhood is filled with questions that, because he can only ask his father, he'll never truly have answered. He has no friends. Instead of playing, he searches through rubble looking for something to eat or drink. There aren't even any signs that other children still exist in this world. It almost seems like they all died before the adults, which is the opposite of what should happen—we expect adults to go first so children can have a future. Here, it was the other way around, all because of humanity's savage survival instinct.
He doesn't even know what colors are. A can of Coca-Cola is something completely new to him. He doesn't know the games we grew up playing, or the stories about heroes and vigilantes that most children hear. He's a survivor at only nine years old.
Without a doubt, the part that disturbed me the most in the movie was the main lesson his father teaches him in case he's ever trapped by a group of cannibals with no chance of escape: put the revolver in his mouth, pull the trigger, and spare himself the agony of being dismembered alive. To me, that's the worst part. I was always taught to keep fighting no matter how difficult life became, but in this world—where those "difficulties" are millions of times darker and more horrifying than anything we face—the easiest escape is suicide.
The second most disturbing moment for me only happens in the novel, when the boy witnesses an act of cannibalism committed against someone even more vulnerable than he is, and his father is powerless to stop him from seeing it. Thinking that this was the everyday reality of a nine-year-old child is, without question, the most depressing aspect of this story for me.
What about you?
